The Patriots Have Ruined The Fun In Football

We all knew that kid when we were young. Maybe he was in your friend group. Maybe he was just an acquaintance. Maybe a brother of a friend. He was the bane of fun. It wasn’t because he was an asshole, not really. It was because he was too good at whatever you wanted to do. Maybe it was Mario Kart. Maybe it was Smash. Maybe it was backyard basketball. It doesn’t really matter what it was. What matters is that when he joined the game, the fun stopped, because he was too good for everyone else. No one wants to play Mario Kart where one person is always in first. No one just casually puts in Smash to have to play with the one guy who knows how to wave dash and knows how many i-frames his dodge roll has. That kid, who was always leagues above everyone else to the point where no one wanted to play anymore, is the Patriots.

The Patriots have done more to make me lose interest in this sport than anything else. The evil practices of the NFL? Makes me mad. My own team sucking? Makes me sad. The incompetence of the league? Makes me mad. The looming injury crisis? Makes me sad. But none of that makes me want to actually stop watching football like the Patriots have. The Patriots have instilled a sense of apathy towards the sport I haven’t experienced since high school, when I was too cool for sports and did other things like play GameCube alone in my basement.

The hate used to sustain me. It sustained me for quite some time. The sense of mild superiority thanks to the 2 Giants victories used to sustain me, but the Pats success since plus the Eagles victory have kind of taken that away. The respect and appreciation for what the team has accomplished used to sustain me as well, the sheer awe of knowing no team will ever be able to replicate what I got to see live. But it’s all ran out. I’m just so tired of the New England Patriots. Of Tom Brady. Of Bill Belichick. I don’t want to watch them anymore.

Last year I went into my worst case scenario Super Bowl as an extremely reluctant Patriots supporter. By the end of the game I was cheering for the Eagles, because at least I was finally going to see something fresh and new. After the game, soaking up the sad Pats fan tears, I made a pact to myself and any readers of this joke that I would finally lay down the hate boner and just…focus on other teams. I realized that even the hate had gotten dull. It’s like a sitcom that’s been on TV for 4 seasons longer than is needed. We have nothing left to say about the Patriots and are just spinning our wheels until it finally ends. We ran out of articles on how amazing it is to see Tom Brady still being so good this old 3 seasons ago. We ran out of ways to praise Bill Belichick. We’ve even run out of ways to predict their downfall. I had a Patriots fan on reddit send me a /r/patriots joke. The fact that this even exists to such accuracy is a testament to how much we’ve run out of things to say, that even our predictions of their eventual downfall is predictable at this point. Every year the Patriots, Brady, and the fans find a more and more bullshit reason to play the underdog card. THE NFL IS OUT TO GET US. ESPN WANTS US TO FAIL BECAUSE TOM HAS A QUACK DOCTOR. This year? Many fans and Brady himself seemingly conjured the idea that people think they suck and no one gave them a chance when…what? Based on a few articles near the beginning of the year speculating about how Gronk is slower now? I can’t even fathom the level of existence Patriots fans inhabit that their sense of success is so utterly warped by 19 years of being the best team in football.

And what can we really say? Trash talk is kind of impossible because nobody’s ever had more sustained excellence than they have. Even as a Giants fan it feels futile. Trolling Pats fans, as I used to quite enjoy doing, has also proven useless as they just let it feed their weird desire to always play the underdog disrespected card. The team itself is operating the same way it always has. Outsmart and adjust better than the competition. When the Patriots have the ball my eyes glaze over. I start looking at my phone. I look at other games if there are others on. Watching them methodically execute near flawless football has lost any sort of magic it once had. I find no pleasure in seeing Tom Brady play perfectly. When any other QB throws a deep slant for a gain of 35, it’s a big play and very exciting. When the Patriots do it, it feels inevitable. The fun is gone.

Sometimes it’s like choosing between watching The Room or Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane is a masterpiece and the Room is garbage. But the Room is so much more fun to watch. All the craft, all the expertise, all the excellence in Citizen Kane doesn’t make it more interesting after a certain point. I’ve gotten so much more enjoyment out of the Room than I ever got out of Citizen Kane. Hell, I could even say I’ve learned more about cinema on an intellectual level by studying The Room than Citizen Kane. The flaws teach you so much and keep things interesting. Basic perfection…never changes.

I spent this season deliberately avoiding the Patriots as much as possible. Any Patriots drama I avoided. No comics. No games. I made a single checkdown midseason after a Patriots loss solely so I could scold everyone in the sports world for being fucking idiots and writing the Patriots off, again. They were always going to reach the AFCCG and anyone who thought otherwise is a goddamned idiot. Stop trying to predict this team’s downfall and just accept fate until it changes. I did my best to avoid becoming even more of a broken record on my own complaints about this team (I’ve basically been saying the same shit since my first year making the comic) But at this point, with only one game left, I kinda ran out of room to keep it up.

I watched the first quarter of the AFCCG and turned it off to do some chores because I was just straight bored. I checked the score in the 4th, saw the Chiefs had pulled ahead, and flipped it back on to catch up. After the Patriots got the ball with 2 minutes to go, I went out to do some laundry and turned it back off, because I knew the ending. Tom Brady driving the field perfectly in the final 2 minutes to watch the game is a football meme. Tom Brady is so good, he’s turned what should be the most exciting situation in all of football into a routine. It’s almost a crime. I saw the Chiefs tie it up when I glanced at my phone, but by that point the Patriots had won the toss and were at midfield, so I didn’t bother turning the game back on. I didn’t have to. The outcome felt inevitable.

The outcome still feels inevitable, even though the rational part of me knows the Rams have an okay chance. The Patriots always play good Super Bowls. This year though I just don’t care. Last year people who don’t follow the sport asked me if the Eagles even had a chance, because they wanted to see if it was worth watching. I said the Eagles did, and most of them still didn’t believe me and didn’t watch. It was the lowest attended SB party I’d been to. This year I feel like it will be even less, with another year of the same fucking team playing a team with a fickle uncaring LA fanbase that will only give a shit if the Rams pull it off. So I might genuinely not watch it. Or bring something else to do in the meantime. I’ve never been more excited for the season to be over more than I am for the Super Bowl. But I am this year and it honestly bums me out.

Discussion (60) ¬

That’s a nice monologue, Dave. And speaks the truth. It’s been a rough few years as a Colts fan, and even with what looks to be a bright future, I’m not really excited at all about next year. The highlight of the year is central doesn’t play east, so Colts don’t have to play the Pats, so I get to not watch them for a year. Go Rams!

I’ve been following your comics since the beginning, never missing a single one, but also sitting in silence, laughing and enjoying your artistry. Never felt a need to comment, however now I do:

As a Pats fan… I’ve never thought about what it was like to NOT be a Pats fan until this article. I’ve always thought that it’s “hard” to be a Pats fan because of the amount of hate/grief we get (especially if you’re not in New England), and how many of our games take 10-15 years off of our life from sheer anxiety. I’ve always thought about how other fans just “hate us cuz they ‘aint us” (bleh) but I can see how our excitement at winning can cause football to become “boring.”

Please, the only time Pats fans experience anxiety is when they aren’t up by 42 in the 4th quarter. My in-laws complaining that they only won by 21 over a playoff caliber team kinda shows where this fanbase is at, by the time Tom Brady retires in 2050, they will gripe about how he only won 30 rings and curse the world for holding him back.

Actually you know nothing about me or what teams I support. I could easily determine you to be a 40yr old virgin living in your mothers basement by the level of keyboard warrioring your doing, but meh. Think what you want.

You’ve always been pretty awesome. Things you’ve drawn have hung up at my workplace fairly often and still do. The Patriots Schadenfreude comic was up for weeks. You even make me able to laugh when my own team sucks – “OH GOD A BAD TEAM ON THE ROAD!” being one of the best.

Just whenI thought I couldn’t love this site any more than I already do, you’re shitting on the Patriots AND competitive Smash in the same comic. (At least in the description, anyway!) Both need nerfed, and badly.

There are a few parallels to the Patriots/Patriots fans and competitive Smash/people who play it that I think could be explored, but there wouldn’t be enough room for it in one comic. The NFL and Smash both try to enforce some sense of parity and closer outcomes. The NFL with the draft order, rules favoring offense over defense to allow for quick scoring, and schedules made so that when you do better in your division, future years have you playing against better placing teams from other divisions for your non-conference games. Smash, likewise, was crafted specifically to inject variance into the results and lower the skill ceiling with things like items, stage hazards, and enough bullshit to go from 0 to KO in 2 seconds flat. Even without the crazy stuff itself, Sudden Death is supposed to give us a comeback mechanic that you can be more damaged than your opponent when time runs out, but so long as the score/stocks are tied, the slate’s wiped clean, you both have 300% damage, and one last shot to secure a win you otherwise would not have achieved.

As a spectator, seeing both of these is boring – both the Patriots doing well and competitive Smash being played with their preferred ruleset of no items, a very limited stage selection, and disregarding Sudden Death. The Patriots don’t care what obstacles you throw in their way, they just manage to keep winning. The whole “Fuck You Tour” when they won after Brady served his 4-game suspension, and how talent just keeps coming to them. They fix other teams’ problems and bring bad otherwise dead players like a goddamn necromancer. In Smash, they just turn those obstacles off. The better player keeps winning. There is no reason one player should have been able to win FIFTY-SIX consecutive tournaments in Smash 4, let alone have a community SUPPORT that and want it to continue. The only reason we’re seeing more parity there is because the guy who WON those 56 tournaments in a row figured out he’d make more money being a stream monster and going full-time doing that and living off of/profiting from Twitch subscriptions than competitive Smash tournament winnings would provide. The best of the game retired and now there’s a bit more variance in who wins – but still not enough.

I was so happy when Nintendo unveiled this Smash Ultimate Open tournament, and announced items would be on and stages would not be limited to the normal fare of competitive play. The reactions from /r/smashbros could have been printed out, blended, and injected into my veins like with your schadenfreude comic. I still hope they run a whole tournament series, drop huge cash payouts into it, and still run that format. I want to see the salt. I want to see their community implode. It’s about as likely as someone literally dropping a nuke on New England, but a man can dream.

People who watch competitive Smash remind me much of people who root for the Patriots. They want to see the best win, parity be damned, viewer interest be damned. If someone bitches about either you could expect a response of “git gud” in return. They don’t care that the fun is entirely gone out of “git”ting “gud” and it’s not worth the years of effort it would take to be even remotely competitive. At least in the NFL you can play for a bad team and make more in one year than a competitive Smasher will make in tournaments for their entire life.

I hope the NFL does something to prevent this level of dominance in the future. Maybe they’ll find some other scandal the Patriots are doing, ban Belichick from any involvement with the NFL, and levy punishments so heavy-handed it makes the world’s jaw drop. I hope Nintendo keeps doing their thing. I just want to be able to watch either and not expect the same person or same few people to win again and again. But I have a feeling we won’t see parity in the NFL until the bulk of the people involved with the current Patriots retire.

The thing is, the NFL has done basically everything they can to basically prevent this. If the Patriots didn’t exist, the NFL would be absolutely lauded for it’s parity (And the NFC over the same time period is a great example). The Pats just grabbed and stuck by the greatest coach of all time, and lucked into a legend at QB, and have operated smarter than everyone else in the time frame. It’s a perfect storm and it’s part of why they are remarkable.

I’m glad you said that Dave. It lets me know I’m not the only one who thinks that. I respect the hell out of what they have accomplished. If they were your team, you know you would love it. I honestly don’t hate them. I just find them almost predictably boring to the point that it’s hard for me to properly appreciate what they’ve done. I’m not saying I like them. I don’t. I just give credit where it’s due.

honestly, they ARE my team and i’m ready for it to be over. LET CHAOS REIGN! LET THE FUCKING LIONS WIN THE SUPER BOWL! BRING BACK STEVE GROGAN! Sell the pats to Aerosmith/Stephen King and let them run it into the ground.

Depends on where the hate applies to, like certain parts of their fan base. Then again success tends to breed this kind of thing but considering that they’re New England sports fan…that’s kind of a perfect storm right there.

With that said, it’s starting to become mystifying how they had a decade old title drought at one point, with 18-1 season being the best known part of it.

Bruh Imagine wanting the NFL to artificially inject parity by ruining the integrity of the game. You realize that is what makes sports and anything in life competitive is an equal chance for both people to win right? Making things random or fixing games and making good teams worse for no reason is the definition of non-competitive. There are no bragging rights if a team wins artificially.

Same thing in smash. Its a skill-based game, the better player wins. That’s how it goes. Having items in competitive is stupid because it means the game is no longer skill-based and is now non-competitive. No one would watch any kind of non-competitive tournament or legue. Imagine if in Tennis a player could randomly bling their opponent or win the point for free for no reason. It would suck. Sure the alternative is that a few players are dominent, but it makes it that much more impressive when people upset them. If you can’t deal with people being better than you in life than you better get used to it.

I couldn’t agree more with this post. The Patriots take all the fun out of watching football. There’s a very good chance I end up spending Super Bowl Sunday at a Patriots fan household for unrelated reasons. But I’m going to bring my laptop and play Stardew Valley or something. If they ask me why I’m not watching the game, I’m pretty much going to recite this post.

I assume you’re a Ravens fan, but even then I cannot imagine how this could possibly be worth it. The Steelers being good enough to win it all multiple times over a long history is not nearly as insufferable as the Patriots being a dumpster fire forever only to suddenly set the record for wins under a SINGLE REGIME.

I told the wife I’ll be outside bbqing. People come over or not give by me. I’ll probably book up the Bluetooth to hear the game too see what is happening but I think, at this point, slow cooking the ribs is a better use of my time than watching the game.

As a Chiefs fan, it really stings knowing that we were the lone hope for a decent Super Bowl and Dee Ford couldn’t be bothered to line up onside. This is the first year I’ve felt this apathetic about the “Big Game”. Probably still watch so I have an excuse to eat copious amounts of junk food, but I’ll be rooting for the meteor.

When I say I don’t care about the Super Bowl and I just want this season to end, I hear comments about how I need to get over it and that I’m just a whining Saints fan. This sums this game up for me pretty well. I love football even when my team loses. Last year, I was mildly interested. This year, I just don’t feel anything. Like the NFL needs to sell me a little blue pill to get my excitement up for the biggest game of the season. It shouldn’t be that way…..right? I know I would care more if my team were playing…..but it’s against the Patriots. And like you said, we know how this usually goes.

For the record, had the Chiefs won, regardless of if it was the Rams or Saints, I would be very interested in the game. Rams-Chiefs earlier this year was a great game. Unless you play or coach defense at least.

The pats used to get me upset all the time but now I just don’t care. I realize that until Brady and belichick leave they will win the AFC every year and probably the super bowl too. I think they will take the chip over the rams, not as high scoring though. Maybe like 28-24. If only big dick nick was still on the rams, then they’d have a chance.

So what you’re saying is, the Rams are in the Super Bowl because Nick Foles played for them. He played for the Chiefs too. See, this means BDN is a blessing for success. Until they meet the Patriots. Only the real deal can beat them.

I so want the Rams to win and get revenge for Spygate, but I expect the Patriots to win because that is what they do. This is the problem. The Superbowl no longer feels exciting, it just feels like an anticipated coronation of the Patriots that you are hoping gets spoiled.

Dave, you need to start watching more hockey. Better than Basketball, heck, even better than football. No current dynasties, cool new teams, fast game. You know what they say: “The good ol’ Hockey game is the best game you can name, and the best game you can name, is the good ol’ Hockey game.”

Yeah as long the Pats are in the playoffs with Brady and Belichick, they’re still a title threat. The Rams will need all the luck they can get.

At least it made the Giants wins in 42 and 46 feel even more special along with the Eagles narrowly avoiding wasting Jason Peters’ career (though he didn’t play due to injury, still what have the Browns done for Joe Thomas?)

I live an hour from buffalo so Im a pretty die hard fan. At work we have vendor who is “that” patiots fan. H always tried to come in and talk shit but I just agree with everything he says because hes not wrong.

He walks in and goes to start shit and I just say yeah no question Brady is GOAT, BB is GOAT, the current pats dynasty is GOAT, its not a question of if your going to the playoffs though divisional title but if your getting the by or not and you probably are. The bills suck and we wont even be contesting the wild card outside of PhD level math beyond thanksgiving.

Imagine playing being in the pats division and having to play them two times every year and they have won the divisional title every year except I think once in like something dumb like 17 years.

I get a lot of shit for saying this, but I really hope the pats win the superbowl. I hope they win because there is a real chance TB retires. There is no way he retires on a loss. I want a divisional shake up or tb to be retired.

gad, lad, that’s a tad bad, makes me feel like a cad for saying the pats are the NFLs dad. Still, I’ll be glad when when the pats pad their nads with a rad wad of um… shad… roe. (it’s delicious. like caviar.)

just being silly (y’know, the way people frequently are on this dezprezfez site), and i’m more a fan of chaos than the pats specifically. see comments above. also, straight. but still, feel free to get bent, weakling snowflake homophobe.

As a 49ers fan, I’m torn on the Super Bowl. My choices are: 1) The Patriots win their sixth Super Bowl and pass the 49ers. 2) A team from Los Angeles wins the Super Bowl (and not the one that I have a soft spot for due to having never won anything ever). I really wanted the Chiefs or the Saints to make it so I would have at least one rooting interest, but as it stands I would rather see the Super Bowl canceled than see either of these teams win.

Remember last year in the Super Bowl when the Patriots announcer called Gronk “an unstoppable Rebel force”? Like, it’s just denial at this point… how do they not see they are obviously the evil empire???

Completely agree with the sentiment here. During the last quarter of the AFCCG I kept thinking about how different I would feel about the SB depending on the outcome. Rams vs Chiefs would have been an exciting matchup between two up-and-coming teams and a rematch of one of the best games of the season.

Rams vs Patriots is just another edition of “Patriots vs ______”, which we’ve seen so many of over the years. There’s no novelty there anymore. Even if the game is objectively good, it’s not entertaining anymore.